Through oppressing women the Church has lost its mission

The Anglican Church has a long and shameful record of discrimination against women, as well as against homosexuals and ethnic minorities. Diverse though they are, these groups have one thing in common, which is what leads to their marginalisation. They are conceptualised as 'the other', defined by their non-conformity to the church's master narrative of white, heterosexual, middle-class, Anglo-Saxon males. While the church retains this extremely narrow mindset, it can only relate to 'the other' from a position of power and exclusion which must inevitably alienate, even repel these groups.

This is a serious problem for the church today for two reasons, both connected to its raison d'être, that is, its mission. The first is that the valuing or placing of any one person or group above others conflicts, at the most basic level, with the value attached to all the children of God, witnessed to in scripture and in the life and ministry of Jesus.

Part of the church's mission is to be a 'credible sign' of the Kingdom of God. While the church discriminates against God's children, it prevents itself from being such a sign; it is instead a sign of something quite different.

The second reason is that the church cannot fulfil its mission to preach the gospel to all people while it is inhospitable to more than half the human race, and prevents them from receiving the "life, in abundance" that we all have been promised.

Does widespread sexism really exist in the church today? Aren't women now taking their place? Sexism is deeply embedded in the church's value systems and structures. It is not simply a question of the ordination of women, nor of their consecration as bishops; indeed, seeing these issues as problems is in itself an outworking of the broadly entrenched sexism that has been institutionalised over centuries. It is a whole system of treatment of all women.

Women are seen as less. The decisions are made by men. That is a plain fact. Churches and church schools have male-only choirs, in which the voice of a boy is valued more highly than that of a girl, and offer scholarships to boys but not girls. Boys are allowed to serve at the altar, but not their sisters. The Mother of Christ is revered, while the mothers of Christians are not allowed in the sanctuary. Women may not be priests, nor lead worship, nor preach. They may minister to women but not to men; they must not fulfil leadership roles.

It has been argued that, today, these appalling acts of discrimination are not as prevalent as they once were and that many of the instances noted above only take place in some parts of the country, in some churches. This is true. But these are the grossest forms of prejudice. What is still extremely widespread is a generalised view of women that they are in some way less than men, and the fact that the most blatant forms of sexism are only present in some parts of the church does not make them one iota more acceptable.

Think for a moment of substituting the word "blacks" for "women" in the examples above. Would Archbishop Tutu or Nelson Mandela feel that there wasn't a problem if blacks were only discriminated against in parts of South Africa? Would Indigenous leaders in Australia and New Zealand feel that there was no racism, if their people were only denied full equality with whites in some places? How can a woman feel that the church does not discriminate against women, just because she does not personally encounter such prejudice, but sees it elsewhere?

Discrimination against a person on the basis of their sex, like their race, is fundamentally unjust, a fact that has long been recognised in the secular world. It has been illegal in most Western countries for some time. The Equal Opportunity Act is one of the Australian government's major pieces of social justice legislation. Virtually the only social institution that has a blanket exemption from its provisions is the Church. Only in the Church is it still legal to prevent women from fulfilling roles or undertaking tasks simply because they are female.

It adds insult to injury that the arguments still raised against women by the fundamentalists at both ends of the church spectrum are marked by such intellectual poverty. The Anglo-Catholics fall back on tradition and the theologically invalid notion of the priest representing Christ at the altar. This stress on the masculinity of the priest eventually brings the focus to bear on the presence of male genitals. This was certainly an issue in the Old Testament. But would male clergy today be prepared to concede that they were unfit to be priests if they became impotent? So, inexorably, the true essence of maleness becomes microscopic. Can Christ really have meant that only people with one chromosome instead of another were fit to be priests?

The extreme evangelicals, on the other hand, fall back on an inerrant scripture and St Paul's words about leadership. Nowhere does Paul say "women cannot be priests", for such an idea could not have occurred to him - in that form - any more than the idea that women might run banks. However, no evangelical really believes in the total inerrancy of scripture. For example, Paul says categorically: "Do not marry" (1 Cor 7). What is the worse sin, then - for a woman to be a priest, or to be married? There is no theology in these arguments, only prejudice.

Women are children of God. In baptism they are received into the body of Christ, that is the Church. Christ suffered and died and rose for them just as much as he did for men. It is an insult to the God of all to say any less, or to say that the Holy Spirit is restricted in calling people to this ministry by their sex. And there is a consideration that overrides all objections, which is that we are commanded to love one another as ourselves. When we want less for women than we want for men, we are not obeying that commandment. We are not loving.